Work Clean (21 page)

When she says this, they hang on her every word.

Back when Rob Halpern ran Marigold, his restaurant in the Spruce Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, he shopped downtown at the Reading Terminal Market. Halpern squeezed himself past the promenaders, browsers, and tourists, shouting “Behind!” from time to time to alert oblivious shoppers to his trajectory. It was kitchenspeak, but Halpern couldn't help himself. He liked the language of the kitchen, found it sensible. You give people information when they need it. When you receive communication, you let folks know you got it.

A produce vendor told him, “That's $4.25 for the tomatoes.”

Halpern replied, “Heard!”

Everybody turned to look at him.
This guy is crazy.

If they ever dined at Marigold or saw the kitchen, they'd understand. Halpern
was
a mad scientist. The kind to buy a fine-but-unremarkable à la carte restaurant in a sleepy Philly neighborhood and transform it into a 14-course, $80 prix fixe epicurean experience of molecular-gastronomy-meets-food-nostalgia with no menu and—aside from one course, the 10th—no choice for the diner. The kind to present a menu of pan-fried quail and lobster bao alongside “dippin' dots” of frozen pureed green vegetables, “push-pops,” and popcorn arriving at the table in a cloud of evaporating liquid nitrogen. The kind to execute that vision while providing
alternate vegetarian, allergen- and gluten-free meals in a restaurant where an average night might require 10 cooks to make dinner for 60 diners comprising nearly 800 plates of food. The kind to serve a bowl of truffled crab macaroni and cheese that inspired one customer, a young woman named Rinna Diaz, to vow she'd marry the person who made it. The kind to buy her an engagement ring not long thereafter.

Dining at Marigold inspired this kind of obsession; working there required it. Halpern's hodgepodge crew of culinary grads and externs—all of them in their twenties—toiled for 12-hour days, wiping clean plates in a water-and-vinegar solution to make them even cleaner, dotting them with demi-glace and painting them with puree, stacking them with perfectly cooked portions of protein. They didn't leave this obsessive way of life at the restaurant. On her way in to Marigold one morning, Kamal—who worked the cold station—stopped at Dunkin' Donuts for a cup of tea. She ended up at the condiment station sorting and arranging the store's packets of sweetener before she left. The “front-of-house” staff, too, was steeped in this culture of mise-en-place. Rachel, one of the waiters, saw her coursework at college improve after working at Marigold. At the preservice meetings, the front-of-house staff proved as engaged as the cooks, calling purveyors to verify, for example, the safety of certain kinds of cheeses for an incoming pregnant customer. The servers were an integral part of this intricate dance of plates out of the kitchen, into the dining room, and back.

For this kind of ballet, you need lockstep. To choreograph it, you need a code and a shared language. How else was Halpern going to manage this insane kitchen, a place where two dishwashers
and
one grill/sauté man were all named Alex, and his gardemanger guy was also named Al? Halpern gave each of them a designated “Alex number.”

A waiter handed a foot-long, 3-inch-wide slip of paper to Halpern, a new ticket, for table 36, from which Halpern read the courses to the crew.

“Order in, table for four, please fire popcorn for four!”

“Heard!” said sous-chefs Tim Lanza and Keith Krajewski.

“Please fire dots for four!”

“Heard!” the cooks at the cold station shouted.

The command to “fire!” the first dishes for each customer was meant for both cold
and
hot plates, signifying that the cooks should prepare for imminent pickup. Now Halpern advised the crew of upcoming courses for table 36:

“This table's going to do four asparagus!”

“Heard!” Al Upshaw said.

“Three quails with one vegetarian egg!”

“Heard!” Alex Vittorio (“Alex 1”) and Andrew Kochan, behind Halpern on the grill, replied.

Once everyone had the orders, Halpern clipped the ticket in a rack by the pass-through window. He circled the items that he just fired: the popcorn and the dots.

When the dots were ready, Kamal yelled: “Four dipping dots!”

“Heard that!” Halpern said. “Food runner please!”

As one of the floor staff arrived, Halpern said, “Four dots are for table 36!”

And as the server ran off with the four plates, she said: “Thirty-six walks!”

Halpern made a slash mark through the circle around “Dots” on table 36's ticket. Then it was on Halpern to time the meals of table 36 and all the others that came in. He did this with a combination of intuition and input from the floor staff. When the server returned and said, “Dots back from 36,” Halpern acknowledged that and fired the next course.

This continued all night. The chef and the crew in both the back and front of house remained locked in with each other. When they said something, they expected a reply. When they didn't receive a reply, they made sure they got one.

A waiter returned with a plate and told Halpern, “I have sweetbreads back from 30.”

Halpern didn't reply, distracted.

“I have sweetbreads back from 30,” the waiter said again, louder.

“Heard,” Halpern replied.

The verification went both ways. Halpern called for a food runner. A voice replied, “Heard!” But no one came to pick up the food.

“Food runner please!” Halpern repeated. “Don't say ‘Heard' and not come over here!”

Here
was what Halpern called Station Four—the small table in the doorway between Halpern's hot line and the cold kitchen on the other side. Why he called it Station Four no one seemed to know. It didn't matter. They knew where it was and what he meant. The same held true for the dozen or so times during a service that Halpern said something like this:

“I need two Phil Collins and one Peter Gabriel, Station Four please!”

“Heard!” a server yelled.

Standing nearby, I turned to look at Halpern.
What the hell?

Halpern laughed, an endearing, nervous, nerdy chuckle. He clarified: He was telling the servers whether they needed to bring a tray or not. “Peter Gabriel” meant “bring a tray.” “Phil Collins” meant “no tray required.”

Here's how absurd this reference is: After Phil Collins, a member of the 1970s progressive rock group Genesis, went solo in the 1980s, he won a Grammy for his solo album
No Jacket Required.
At some point, Halpern probably got tired of saying “no tray required” and hit upon this quick substitute. And for the opposite of a Phil Collins, “bring a tray,” he defaulted to Collins's former bandmate in Genesis, Peter Gabriel.

Ridiculous. But for the crew of compulsives at Marigold—Robert, Keith, Tim, Andrew, Kamal, Rachel, Emily, Solomon, Alex 1, Alex 2, Alex 3, and Al—it worked.

The heartbeat of the kitchen has always been the
call and callback
between a chef and her cooks.

Even in this gilded digital age of computer keypads, screens,
and printers, the communication in many of the world's finest kitchens remains completely verbal and manual.

Here's how that traditional system works:

Servers write orders on paper and hand them to the chef or whomever is acting as the
expediter
—the person giving orders to the cooks and gathering finished plates to serve.

The chef says “Ordering!” and calls those orders out to the cooks. Sometimes those verbal commands are supplemented with duplicates, or “dupes,” of the order ticket. The cooks confirm to the chef that they've received the order by repeating the items and quantities. They then find a way to keep all that information organized: They memorize; they put raw ingredients in pans; they read the dupes again. Sometimes they lose their place and ask the chef for an “all day,” a refresher on all the orders currently working. When the cook on grill says, “What do I have all day on steak?” the chef might reply, “All day: two rare, two medium-rare.”

When the chef says “Fire!” on a particular table or dish, the cook repeats the command, takes those ingredients in hand, and brings them to temperature—in other words, the cook makes all the moves necessary so that she can plate the dish when asked.

The chef officially asks for those plates when she says “Pick up!”—meaning that the cooks should plate the dishes in question and bring them as quickly as possible to the “pass” or shelf between the chef and the cooks. The cooks confirm the command and do just that. Then the chef may call for a food runner or back waiter, who rushes the food out to the tables.

The profusion of “stations” in a kitchen—grill, sauté, vegetable, appetizer, fry, dessert, and more—adds to the complexity of that communication system, especially when you consider that one plate may contain ingredients from multiple stations. Something as simple as a steak with fries and salad demands coordination between cooks on grill, fry, and garde-manger stations. Those
cooks, in turn, must communicate with each other to make sure that all the elements on the plate are finished at the same time; fries can't get soggy on the pass while a steak finishes on the grill; a steak can't get cold in the window while it waits for a salad order that the garde-manger didn't hear.

Call and callback is not just vertical, from chef to cooks; it's also horizontal, between cooks. A cook might ask his fellow, “How many minutes on that steak?” “Five minutes,” might come the reply. And the cooks in turn gauge and adjust their speed to coordinate their finishing times.

“Sometimes as a line cook, I'd repeat somebody else's order, even if it wasn't my station, just to make sure we all heard,” says Michael Gibney. “What you trust each other to deliver is inviolable.”

“I would run that shit like a fucking ballet,” Jarobi White remembers. “I'd say, ‘Don't pay attention to nothing else, just hear my times. I need such-and-such in 4 minutes. If you need an extra 3 minutes, let me know.' And sure enough we'd all be turning around with our finished plates at the same time.”

Most kitchens generate a huge amount of ambient noise: the sounds of flames, the clatter of dishes, the spray of water, and the constant whir of the venting system. In the midst of this racket, different kitchens have different communication styles, depending on the will of the chef. Many roil with cooks' banter; others are quiet save for the sound of call and callback, because for chefs that information is vital and paramount.

Call and callback, a system of communication and confirmation, is a vital behavior and principle of the kitchen environment because there is so little tolerance for mistakes and so much blowback from making them. Nothing can be lost. One order missed, and an entire table's food can be delayed. In some high-end restaurants, if one plate is wrong, all the other plates must be redone. One table's delay can throw off the rhythm of a kitchen and an entire restaurant. One bad night can generate dozens of bad experiences for customers. Dozens of bad experiences can spell bad word of mouth, bad reviews, lost revenue, and—eventually—a closed restaurant.

A kitchen like Marigold in Philadelphia, with its oral fixation approaching the ornate, can seem fussy or pretentious to the casual visitor, its cooks neurotic and nerdy. But that complicated call and callback provides a manifestly practical bulwark against a failure that can happen at any moment.

Believe it or not, Halpern's vocabulary is not precise enough for some culinarians.

At the CIA, Melissa Gray and her fellow students kept a running joke.
If your friend tells you something, anything, you reply, “Heard!”

“We said it just to be ridiculous,” Gray recalls. “People
hated
‘Heard.'”

When someone shouted “Heard!” in her skills class, Gray remembers her instructor Chef Rudy Speckamp would reply: “Herd? What herd? Herd of cows? Don't tell me ‘Heard.' Tell me
what
you heard.”

Even “Yes, Chef!”—that mantra of honor, reverence, and deference—isn't enough for some people.

“You got four bass on order,” Chef LiPuma calls to one of his students on sauté at American Bounty.

“Yes, Chef!” comes the reply.

“Don't
‘Yes, Chef'
me,” he says. “Say what I say. You've got four bass on order.”

“Four bass, Chef!”

Specific communication has been a part of the professional culinary heritage for more than a hundred years, and in military cultures for longer than that, but it came relatively recently to other disciplines. Now often used in psychotherapy and counseling and well represented in the teachings of corporate communications consultants, the technique is called
active listening,
or sometimes mirroring: the process of repeating or paraphrasing communication from someone else, be it a partner or colleague. Active listening verifies to the sender that his message has been received; it gives
him the opportunity to catch an error or omission early; and it helps the receiver retain that information better, taking the words “into the body.” As a result, active listening builds trust, important in battle, whether during war or dinner.

In the kitchen and the military, respect matters. The honorific of “Chef” can and does instantly communicate hierarchy. In the best kitchens the term
Chef
communicates something more subtle: not just “you are my chief,” but “you are my teacher.” To
accept
being called Chef confirms that obligation. It is a two-way promise: a pledge to learn and trust, and a vow to coach and be trustworthy. In these kitchens, the repetition of “Yes, Chef!” can be a beautiful thing to witness.